Humane and carefully argued responses to events of recent years, coupled with a long look back at the African past.
Deftly connected autobiographical essays by renowned Nigerian author Achebe (Languages and Literature/Bard Coll.; Anthills of the Savannah, 1987, etc.).
“I have news for you,” he writes. “Africa is not fiction. Africa is people, real people.” In his first new book since Anthills, Achebe challenges the economic-development experts of today, the successors of the colonialists of yesteryear. Allowing for the good intentions of both, the author examines the effects of outside tinkering with the continent, which today can take the form of bankers’ “structural adjustments” that result only in the continued immiseration of ordinary people. One source of such actions is paternalism, alluded to in the title of the collection, and Achebe allows for a bit of it in himself when he writes of his native country, “Nigeria is a child. Gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed, and incredibly wayward.” And terribly corrupt, as well, which is no impediment to Achebe’s call for well-meaning people to roll up their sleeves and get to work helping Africa in real ways. Achebe’s view of African realities is hard-won, born of years of exile and thousands of miles of travels across the continent. He refrains, as he notes with some irony, from lecturing on colonialism per se, but he articulates a clear view of the ill effects of colonial rule. He also revisits a number of themes addressed in other works, including his objection to the European literature surrounding Africa, notably Joseph Conrad’s ungenerous Heart of Darkness, and his championing of African writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Cheikh Hamidou Kane (“Conrad portrays a void; Hamidou Kane celebrates a human presence and a heroic if doomed struggle”). For every supposed primitive sensibility and quaint superstition to be found in Africa, Achebe observes, there’s a counterpart in America and Europe—reason enough to shed ethnocentrism and open one’s eyes.
Humane and carefully argued responses to events of recent years, coupled with a long look back at the African past.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27255-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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